Considering quality and versatility package, nothing beats Darktable. And that's even before taking into acount that it's free. My current favourite is Silkypix 7 though, less versatile but the image quality is better than Darktable, the difference was enough to justify the price for me. Capture One, even with the v9 engine, seems to impose a certain look on all images that I simply don't like (skin tones in particular)

Even with only a few hours use, it seems to be a huge improvement over 9.03 in stability and performance (on MacOSX). This is particularly true when navigating or rotating images, which was slow and occasionally show only a low resolution image on screen.

Personally I prefer the C1 output over Lightroom. By default it tends not to oversaturated reds so much, which sometimes causes gamut clipping on output or display in LR. The default NR is a bit heavy, but easily changed.

Personally I prefer the C1 output over Lightroom. By default it tends not to oversaturated reds so much, which sometimes causes gamut clipping on output or display in LR. The default NR is a bit heavy, but easily changed.

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So far, in my very limited experience with post processing in general , I've noticed that I have less to do in C1 than say DXO. C1 seems to do things intelligently and you can play with the settings more, esp in the exposure tab w/o the picture looking over processed. So for example if I increase the brightness it doesn't blow out the highlights as easily. It seems to make sensible decisions. However I see where that could be a problem if you were actually trying to get the overprocessed look.

Have the Apple one on my Mac that would be used by Photos. Have the DxO Optics one. Have the Adobe one that is part of the Photography CC package. For snapshots done with iPhone, Photos is good enough. For my serious photography the Adobe one using Lightroom as the DAM. On occasion I will use DxO Optics, but that is getting rare.

Well, I was originally a Lightroom user from the V1 Beta days and by Lr3, I had become disenchanted with it. I wrote about it in my blog here.

I still think of these tools as workflow managers, and I liked ACDSee's ability to control workflow the best. DXO is JUST a raw developer and makes no pretensions to controlling the entire workflow. CaptureOne's user interface in my mind, is in need of a major overhaul, it is counter intuitive and frustrating at every turn. ACDSee is every bit as powerful as Lightroom as a workflow tool, and by using a heirarchical database instead of a relational (I'm a retired DBA so that's my computer geek talking), it offers faster response time.

In terms of raw development capabilities, I feel ACDSee is every bit as good as the three you mention, and the tools seem logical and intuitive. The ACDSee Light EQ tool offers incredible control over dynamic range, allowing me to squeeze all the DR out of an image that my camera can offer. I wrote about that HERE. I also like the similar tools for B&W conversion. Plus I like how it handles ORF files.

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